Reimbursement
A little more than four months after Highmark, western Pennsylvania's largest insurer, provided a $50 million cash infusion to help prop up struggling provider West Penn Allegheny Health System, the boards of both companies on Tuesday approved a definitive affiliation agreement.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services yesterday announced it will increase payment rates under its Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) by 1.9 percent and its Ambulatory Surgical Center (ASC) payments by 1.6 percent in 2012.
Humana Inc. this morning released financial results for its third quarter that showed net profits up more than 13 percent compared to its third quarter 2010 results.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced Monday that HP Enterprise Services will be a prime contractor for the VA Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology (T4) program, which aims at transforming the VA's IT programs in order to improve quality of healthcare and benefits services to veterans, their families and survivors.
To muted applause and some sighs of relief from providers, HHS released the final ACO regulations last week. The final version superseded the much-criticized draft regs published several weeks earlier. This previous draft was widely regarded as imposing overwhelmingly complex rules for the chance of sharing in any gains.
U.S. healthcare prices increased in September 2011, rising 0.2 percent over August prices, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Pay-for-performance (P4P) does not cause a negative impact on patient outcomes, according to a new study.
Pay-for-performance (P4P) does not result in providers cherry-picking patients, nor does it cause a negative impact on patient outcomes, according to a new study by researchers from the American College of Surgeons (ACS), released at the ACS Clinical Congress in San Francisco on Thursday.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services clearly listened to the provider and insurer communities in determining the final rule for how to establish accountable care organizations (ACOs). CMS is much more systematic about the establishment of ACOs, laying out a ramp-up period and then a shared savings model down the road, according to payers and their stakeholders.